Innovative grammatical constructions like “stay woke” and “wokeness” powerfully evoke the ongoing struggle for justice embodied in Black Lives Matter and the movements that came before it, as well as those that followed, including the reinvigorated women’s movement and the swell of activism on the American left working for visibility, participation and self-determination of marginalized people at all levels of civic life. Historically, the phrase stay woke, Cauley wrote, “acknowledged that being black meant navigating the gaps between the accepted narrative of normality in America and our own lives.” Mckesson broadcast his arrest on Periscope, where viewers around the world watched him handcuffed by the police in a T-shirt reading “#StayWoke,” the millennial iteration of an adage that has bolstered the black community’s freedom fight since the black labor movement of the 1940s, as Kashana Cauley explored in The Believer. 9, 2016, in Baton Rouge - not so far from the novel’s setting of Grand Isle (or what’s left of Grand Isle after so many superstorms) - the activist DeRay Mckesson was arrested while protesting the extrajudicial execution of Alton Sterling by the police. She is beckoned - like Eve, like the women convened at Seneca Falls decades before, like Betty Friedan and Audre Lorde decades later, like Claudia Rankine today - to “use language to mark the unmarked.”Īwakening as a metaphor for accessing not only the unfamiliar part of one’s consciousness but the buried truth of our society has exploded into the mainstream thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement. Edna edges into the uncharted territory of her own consciousness.

Yet also partly named: oppression, anguish. Whatever it is, it is indescribable, unfamiliar, vague. Pontellier was by that time thoroughly awake.”Īwake to what? After the fight, Edna moves out to the balcony and weeps profusely: “An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish.” She springs out of bed to check, while Léonce - no longer worried, if he ever actually was - enjoys his cigar. When Edna dares doubt this, Léonce calls her a bad mother. He has spent the evening at a casino and now it’s approaching midnight, but the card game has left Léonce “in high spirits, and very talkative.” He wakes his wife to gossip but she answers him sleepily, “with little half utterances.” Spurned, and still intent on rousing her, Léonce manufactures a fever for their sleeping son. Early in “The Awakening” - Kate Chopin’s great feminist novel of identity and self-consciousness, which still throbs with relevance more than 120 years after its publication - the heroine’s husband picks a fight.

The Awakening by Kate Chopin